This week, Dan and John talk about:
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The show title refers to challenge coins that you are supposed to hand to somebody on occasion and you are not supposed to be able to buy them because then they are just a thing you bought.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
Weather in Seattle, waiting for The Big One (RW225)
Dan is doing okay, but it is still too warm in Austin and they lost their Seattle rain. John can't talk about the weather with anyone from the rest of America because it has been raining all week and now it is in the high 60s and for the next 10 days it is going to be 79 degrees with a light breeze off the water, nothing to complain about. The one thing is that they are teetering on the edge of a very unstable plate that is long overdue for a major correction of world historical proportions. When the big one is going to hit you are going to read about it in the news because it is going to send a wave to Japan, for one thing. It is something they are all conscious of all the time here.
The newcomers, the people that moved up to Seattle because they got some tech job and they have a poster of a Lamborghini pinned above the fireplace of their $2 million condo don't know or care, but anybody that has ever lived there for for long enough to get integrated into the Northwest knows it is a ticking time bomb. The volcano is right there, John can see it from where he is. It is not Mount St. Helens, which is genuinely an active volcano with smoke pouring out from it today, but it is weirdly situated in a place where you have to go to it in order to see it, like Devil's Tower. You can't see Devil's Tower from anywhere except for Devil's Tower.
You are driving, it is just the normal America, the prairie, rolling hills, and you turn a corner and there it is: Devil's Tower in all its majesty! After you looked at it and dealt with it you get in your car and as you leave the parking lot it is gone. Was it ever there? Mount St. Helens isn't visible from anywhere, but when you go there, it is like: ”Whoa!” But Mount Rainier is visible from everywhere and they can all see it. In Tacoma it looms over them like Snoopy when Snoopy pretends to be a vulture. It feels like it is right there in Seattle, but in Tacoma it is really in their front yard. It is not an active volcano, but Mount St. Helens wasn't an active volcano until it was.
Seattle has volcanoes, earthquakes, and potential for tsunami. Everyone has the risk of fire. If you went to anybody in Seattle and tap them on the shoulder and said: ”When is The Big One going to happen?” everybody would know what you were talking about. There is only one The Big One and everybody got a theory about it. In 2015 there was a wonderful article about it called The Really Big One in The New Yorker by Kathryn Schulz who graduated into a class of magazine article writers where she can do whatever she wants. Every article she writes is phenomenal, they all require a bunch of research.
John met her a couple of times. They were standing together at a party, talking to people. ”What do you do?” - ”Oh, I got a band!” - ”What's your band?” - ”The Long Winters” - ”Oh, I love The Long Winters!” - ”Oh, great! What do you do?” - ”I am a writer!” - ”Oh, where do you write for?” She didn't write for The New Yorker at the time and then when she got hired at The New Yorker John met her again and that is the type of thing you congratulate somebody for. Then she started coming out with these articles where it was like: ”Now you are the greatest, you are my hero!” and now John wishes that he could go back to the times that he met her and say 40 things in quick succession because now John is an avid follower.
The article is basically written from inside John’s mom’s brain because she and his sister are obsessed with The Big One, not just talking about it, but they have screwdrivers tied to pieces of string drilled into walls next to things that potentially might need a screwdriver in the event of The Big One. His mom bought a Seal-a-Meal, a thing where you put your food into a plastic bag and it sucks the air out of it to seal it, but she is not using it for food, but to prepare multiple little gallon-sized disaster mini kits with some gauze, a switchblade, and some fire-starting equipment. She doesn't right now because she lives in a two-bedroom condo, but in John’s house she has stockpiled survivalist level gear and they all sit down and talk about it.
Where are we going to go when The Big One hits? They rendezvous at Point Alpha and then they move to point X coordinates and if you can't get there, send a flare or tie this flag to the tail of a squirrel or whatever. Like every survivalist they have gone bonkers and they are forgetting that when it happens else in the world will be focused on helping Seattle. There is not a situation where The Big One is going to happen, they survive and are in good enough shape to rendezvous at Point Alpha, but then will also have to forage for food for a year. People from San Francisco will be arriving within 24 hours and then people from all over the world will come and they will have all kinds of food.
John is not saying that they don't need some gear and that they shouldn't be ready to feed themselves and be prepared, but they don't need a year's worth of canned corn. They look at him like he doesn’t know what he is talking about and: ”Okay, keep a year's worth of canned corn!” One of the reasons that John bought that 1979 Suburban was that it is a completely mechanical vehicle and an electromagnetic pulse would have to be pretty pulsy to conk out the electrical system of that truck, especially since the electrical system just conked itself out and John still got it running. There is barely an electrical system in that truck.
EMP / Nuclear blast radius around the Bangor Submarine Base (RW225)
Dan’s understanding is that an EMP actually can fry the wires, not just that it shorts the battery. Dan would think the EMP is going to be right over Downtown Seattle if there is one, that is where he was going to do it. John does not agree because in the Northwest they have one of the very largest nuclear submarine bases, which is over in Kitsap County far enough that when the nuke goes off over Bangor Submarine Base… Dan feels like John is a target. John thinks he will still have a chance to get down into his bomb shelter. The base is over there, not right here.
Bangor is 20 air miles from Seattle, and it is the largest nuclear weapons storehouse in the United States with 1/4 of America’s 10.000 nuclear weapons, possibly the largest storehouse in the world. There are only two bases, Bangor and Kings Bay, Georgia, where sub nukes are stored, and that is half of their strategic weapons. John got a bomb shelter with a year's worth of canned corn, so he is going to have to ride this one out.
Dan sends John to a website where you can simulate the radius of a bomb, called Nuclear Secrecy. When John worked at the magazine store, Business Insider was just some magazine, but now it has weird articles in it. What is going on with that? Where did Business Insider become the one that was like: ”Oh, you want an interactive tool that allows you to see the effects of nuclear weapons?” Shouldn't that be in a different magazine? What infuriates John right out of the gate are the cities that they have as presets. Boston? No-one gives a shit about that in a global context! For Dan it would be the first city to get rid because of the accent.
From the standpoint of global thermonuclear war Boston has zero strategic importance. You are just going to kill the Hodgman family or whatever. Boston and Seattle have almost the same population, but one of those two cities has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world and one of them has some middle aged white dudes walking around in sideways Gucci baseball hats tagging people's vans. Seattle is not on this list. It goes Washington, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Honolulu. Who cares about Honolulu?
Pearl Harbor, yes, but at the point that you are sending ICBM's Pearl Harbor’s relevant as the harbor that is full of pearls or close to pearls, nobody cares how many frigates you have when cities are being blown up by nukes. What they care is how many nuke subs you have, not how many pickets you have or how many out of commission aircraft carriers. Also: A concentric circles from Hawaii goes out into the ocean very fast. If they blow up Honolulu, nobody really cares about Kauai either. Maybe Zuckerberg is on some island out there, but no one gives a good God damn.
Why isn't Seattle on this pulldown list? It should be right at the top! Also, Seattle is very topographically interesting from a Ground Zero perspective. You got water, you got big hills, you got mountains, you got forests. It is not as simple as Moscow: Take a map of Moscow and draw some concentric circles around it. But Seattle? You got to account for all these different conditions. If John went down into his ravine the explosion would just waft right over him. It would set the trees on fire. John’s bomb shelter was built for this very purpose.
Sleeping in the tour van in Boston (RW225)
John got 15 stories about being in Boston where he felt like punching somebody or somebody felt like punching him. In American cities it is right up there in terms of having anecdotes about it, firsthand experiences like: ”What the fuck was that?” One time John was sleeping in his van outside of a club, taking a nap before the show, and he heard a sound like a rattlesnake. Out the window there were two maybe 35 year-old white guys dressed in Hip Hop clothes standing right next to his van.
When John’s band was on tour with a van full of gear, driving across America, they always had one guy sleep in the van, which was always great. It is really easy, you know what the deal is, you are in your little cocoon, and you feel good about the fact that you are protecting the gear. In the course of many years there were incidents where you wake up in the middle of the night and somebody is around the van who shouldn't be there.
These guys were right outside the van, fucking around, and John was sick, which is why he was taking a nap, and they didn't appear to be doing anything, just making rattlesnake noise, whatever that was, and then they got into some low-rider BMW and drove off. They had their baseball hats on half-sideways and were wearing Gucci jackets or something. The whole thing was like: ”Okay, whatever, Boston!”, but later John realized they were tagging the side of his van. The rattlesnake sound was them with a spray paint can and they tagged the van in the middle of the evening in Cambridge out in front of this club, and these guys were in their 30s and they were driving a BMW.
The whole business of it just made John go: ”You know what? That is so Boston!” That is not what you think of when you think of Boston, you think everybody is in tri-corner hats, whatever you think of with Boston, but when you really have any experience of it, it is like that. That is so Boston!
One time out in the plains states John woke up when somebody was standing on the bumper. What are they doing? John waited if they were trying to break into the van because that is the type of thing he loves handling, but they were just standing on the bumper to get up high enough to look for something on the horizon. Was he looking for an antelope?
John finally being a Kentucky Colonel (RW225)
John is a Kentucky colonel now, he finally was given his Kentucky Colonelship, he talked about it enough times on enough different platforms that someone finally listened. There were a lot of people in Kentucky who were Kentucky colonels themselves who were trying to get John approved, but he was turned down, which was a little bit heartbreaking, but then someone finally pulled it off and his colonelship arrived.
What puts a slight little coloration on it is that Ken Jennings also is a Kentucky colonel and he barely understands what it is, let alone appreciate it. Colonel Sanders is a Kentucky Colonel, he never commanded any troops. He was a Kentucky Colonel, which is an honorary colonelship in the great state of Kentucky that is bestowed upon people who have done humanitarian work or work that elevates the state of Kentucky and it was a stretch, but now John can wear his tunic bedecked with the medals that accompany your Kentucky Colonelship.
John has not won that many awards and even fewer of those awards came with medals. Originally Jason Isbell, the music star, brought Kentucky Colonelship to John’s attention. He said he was a Kentucky Colonel and he thought he could get John to be a Kentucky Colonel. Somehow it came up in conversation between them, and Jason promised to do this work to try and get this for John because John has done a lot of great work for the state of Kentucky.
John’s father’s mother's family is from Kentucky, they were prominent Kentuckians before the Civil War. There are a couple of homes in Kentucky that have plaques out in front of them because they were owned by John’s honorable ancestors. People aren't going there really, but still. In general there are probably enough people listening to John’s programs and his albums in the great state of Kentucky that it can be argued that he has uplifted a certain small proportion of the people in the great state of Kentucky.
Kentucky Colonelship has evolved into something like the Rotarians. You receive this honor from the governor and then you go out and hang out with other Kentucky Colonels and build birdhouses or help send kids to a semester overseas. It is a community benefactor type thing.
The Rotary Club hands out medals like they are going out of style. John’s dad has so many medals from the Rotary Club, including one in a blue box that looks like the Nobel Peace Prize, called the earnest Schmendrick Award for humanitarian work or something. John’s dad had so many medals because he came from a time when they gave you a medal if you did something. Dan’s granddad had also received many, many, many medals. We don't give out enough medals anymore! People make you buy a challenge coin now, but that is not even a thing you should be able to buy. A challenge coin is something you have to get from somebody!
Challenge coins are wonderful pieces of swag, but when Friendly Fire had challenge coins made John said: You carry them in your pocket and when you meet somebody who says they love Friendly Fire you shake their hand and you palm them a challenge coin. That is the point of them! The guys were like: ”… or you could sell them on your website!” Now those are a collector's item. If you come up to John and show him your Friendly Fire challenge coin: ”God bless you!” John will give you a kiss on both cheeks!
As a Kentucky colonel John feels a little bit prejudicial about Tennessee because first of all: Tennessee gets all the press because of freakin Nashville and Memphis. Kentucky can't really rival either of those. Dan can’t name a city in Kentucky from the top of his head. He doesn’t even know where the Kentucky Derby takes place. It is at Churchill Downs in Kentucky. The largest towns in Kentucky are Louisville and Lexington. John’s people are from the region around Danville, Kentucky. Bluegrass music is arguably from the mountains there.
You hear more about West Virginia than you do Kentucky. It is surrounded by states that get more press, like Indiana or Ohio. You don't hear about Arkansas very much. Ever since Bill Clinton Arkansas is not in the papers like it was.
The decline of the Boeing Aircraft Factory (RW225)
John’s neighborhood is close to Boeing Field, which used to be the Boeing aircraft factory. Like everything that is not as good as it used to be Boeing aircraft are now made in factories around the world and then assembled here in Seattle, but assembling airplanes is not the same as building them. Boeing used to set a very high standard for American manufacturing and there is a reason that Boeing aircraft spanned the globe, but then Boeing became a for-profit corporation. It always was for profit, but it became one of those corporations that was being run by people that thought that business was the business they were in.
They weren't in the business of making airplanes, but they were in the business of business, so they off-shored and they downsized and they delegated and they built factories in Tennessee or wherever you build factories, they probably took over the old Saturn car factory and gave all those people with their safety glasses and their head visors new jobs. Somehow in America we are always trying to keep people in Tennessee in manufacturing jobs, whyever that is so important to us. Things were getting made in Italy, things were getting made in Islamabad, or whatever, and then it is all coming to Seattle and sort of fits together.
What you don't want with airplane manufacturing is for stuff to sort of fit together. You want it all to really super duper fit together. The Boeing Aircraft Company has been a cascading clusterfuck for the last 20 years and they don't seem to get it that they should have never tried to do this dumb thing. They have lost hundreds of billions of dollars while they purportedly were trying to save tens of millions of dollars by getting out of Seattle and making airplane parts in Tennessee. What did Tennessee do for us? Not a damn thing!
Dan argues that a lot of good music comes out of Nashville, but that is the past. A lot of great manufacturing was coming out of Buffalo, New York, at some point and the 1959 Cadillac Biarritz brought a lot of joy to people. Those things were not made in Tennessee, but in the American industrial Rust Belt heartland, like Detroit. From a American business perspective we want to bring business down to the He-Ha’s because they are a third world country, no offense to John’s good friends in the American South
John is infuriated at the Boeing Company because they have desecrated the Northwest by being such a bumbling clown car of business fools. You should go anywhere around the world and see that Boeing aircraft and go: ”Yeah, God damn it! Yeah, look at it! It is a thing of beauty!” and they let Airbus into the game, they should have shot them down right out of the gate, but they managed to get their foot in the door and now look at them! They are thriving! They are doing a great job! People in Dubai are like: ”Yeah, let's buy some Airbus!” and they are fine.
How did Bombardier get into the game? They should never have gotten out of Canada! It is just because Boeing took their eye off the ball because they are making so much money selling laser satellites and cruise missiles and all that stuff that you don't even see. Who knows where they make cruise missiles? Dan worked at a company that designed them, Coleman Research was the name of it, and Coleman Aerospace was the division that made the missiles. They used to do missile tests 30 minutes from where Dan was working, but Dan didn't do anything with that, he just ran the computer stuff. A lot of the people that worked there had higher level clearances because it was a government contractor that did missiles.
When you look at the top businesses in the United States, the ones that aren't insurance companies and medical stuff and are not oil companies, they are defense contractors: General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, and Boeing went around and bought a bunch of them which again: ”Stop doing that! Let McDonald Douglas alone!” Raytheon is probably building all these missiles, but they keep that secret and then Boeing makes all this money and then they screw up, they make a 737 that they can't get the right part for and a couple of them crash because a computer program was FUBAR.
But then the people that made the computer program said it wasn’t FUBAR, the computer program was fine, it was some other thing, kicking the football around at Boeing headquarters. Meanwhile the assembly line of 737 can't stop. If you stop the assembly line the concrete hardens or something, and you can't get it started back up, the specific gravity of the Northwest changes and it precipitates a tsunami. For whatever reason you got to keep the assembly line going.
Normally an airplane is just a twinkle in somebody's eye until someone takes two parts out of a bin and sticks them together and that is the beginning of your airplane. They pass them to the next person and that person sticks two more things on it and pretty soon it starts to look like an airplane. In the case of the 737 they actually make the body somewhere else in the country, probably Tennessee, and they ship them across the country in giant trains, each rail car has one green-painted fuselage from a 737, and the trains snake their way across the country. There was one famous one that derailed and fell into a ravine and the ravine was full of aircraft fuselages like pick-up sticks.
Every day in the Northwest and you get stopped at some ding, ding, ding, ding, ding train crossing while 25 airplane fuselages go by on their way to the plant. The plant up north in Everett that is making the jumbo jets, the 47, the 77, and the 87 are doing something else up there. Those fuselages wouldn't fit on a train. Neither one of these factories can you stop it. As they are moving the airplanes through, if something fails a test, like: ”This light should go on and it didn't!” If John went outside his front door and swung a cat he would hit three Boeing engineers. If they can't fix it on the assembly line they don't have time to monkey around because there is another one right up its butt.
They push the plane out at the end of the assembly line, they can't stop, they can't screw around, and they will park it over there and try and fix it. If they can get it in the air they actually fly it down to Seattle and there is a whole: ”What is the matter with your plane?” crew that lives at Boeing Field and they will fix your plane that you couldn't fix on the assembly line. They will actually fly it down here and go over it again because you can't park it out front for long because more are coming.
What happened with the 37 was that they had some FUBAR part that they couldn't get and they started stacking these planes up and kept stacking them, kept making them, can’t stop making them, and pretty soon every abandoned lot in the Northwest is full of parked 737 in all the airlines of the world, one after another, parked as close to each other as you can get them, filling up acres and acres and acres of land and they keep making them and they are waiting for whatever company it is in Israel or wherever they are making the little fucked-up part that keeps the planes from bursting into flame in midair.
They ran out of stupidium and had to go mine stupidium, but there was a revolution in that country and they had to find a new supplier, but Vladimir Putin is sitting on a throne made out of stupidium and they can't get it.
John reads Business Insider just as far until the first time there is a pop up that says: ”Would you like to subscribe to Business Insider?” and then he force closes, so he never gets down to the bottom of the article where it is actually telling him what the problem is and frankly he doesn’t care. The problem is that they didn't make it in Seattle. They should have made it here where people know what they are doing and if it doesn't fit you go to the guy next door.
Those scenes in the movies where all the astronauts’ wives in 1962 are all having a cocktail party and serving jello salad and the astronauts are out front, standing in front of their Corvettes, smoking cigarets, the kids are running around, that is what it was out there for decades, all these Boeing engineers with pocket protectors and crewcuts and their bouffanted wives, smoking cigarets, but that was why the planes flew.
John’s parents and sister not being good drivers (RW225)
Neither one of John’s parents were that good of a driver. They both loved their car, they loved to drive, but neither one of them was a very good driver. John’s sister loves to drive and she is not that good of a driver either. The lanes on a highway are there as general guides and you move around in the lane. John gets pulled over sometimes by state troopers who ask him how much he had to drink because he was weaving all over, but there is a lot of play in the steering wheel and there is nobody around.
Being a good driver is being hyper aware of the other drivers that are all around you, hyperaware of what they are doing, what they are indicating they are going to do. As John drives down the road he assess every other car on the road. This car is suggesting that the person in it is looking at their phone, this car is suggesting that the person in it is almost too drunk to drive. This person does not know that there are other cars on the road. This person believes that the speed limit is real. You are just looking at everybody, trying to figure out what they are going to do, and that is what keeps the whole thing running and nobody is going to surprise John with any weird thing because he has already peeped them and he knows when the weird thing happens who it is going to be, generally.
John’s sister is a very aggressive driver. She is looking at what everybody else is doing, but she has a plan, which is to get around them. She is only aware of what they are doing as part of her scheme, which is to get past them. John’s mom is a defensive driver, but she is driving as though it is a game where other people are going past you and you are trying to get from this lily pad to that lily pad and there are logs and crocodiles, like Frogger.
John’s dad drove like he took his living room and he put wheels on it and he was going to get from from point A to point B in his living room in a masculine way. He wasn't going to get out of anybody's way, he wasn't going to get in anybody's way, he was going to get from here to there, and he was going to listen to an 8-track tape of Stan Getz and have a good old time.
When John says ”not good drivers” he doesn’t mean ”bad drivers”. Adam Pranica of Friendly Fire fame is a really good driver. He knows what his car is doing, he knows how it is going to behave, he is watching everybody, when he wants to go fast he does it very intentionally, but he is not weaving in and out of traffic. He is very deliberate.
John’s mom trying to buy an apartment in Burien (RW225)
John is a little frustrated right now because he is in a situation with American banking and the depth of their depravity is revealed to him. We talk about banks and we grimace at them, but a bank doesn't really intrude in your life most of the time until it does and when it does, you are like: ”Really? This is how you are running this country and the world, you bastards?”
John’s mom who is 87 has an apartment in the center of Capitol Hill, which from day to day seems like it is going to secede from the union and form its own republic. She is living up there and the rest of the family has moved to the suburbs, which is the opposite of how this should have gone. She has been committed to her revolutionary stance up there and at 87 she is still hale and hearty, but there is just a little bit of looking into the future where like: ”Now are you going to be 95 and living on Capitol Hill by yourself while your granddaughter and everybody else is living out here in the trees? Is that really your plan? Because Mom, I am not sure that that is a long term strategy!”
You couldn't tell John’s dad anything, but you can tell his mom even fewer things than you could tell his dad in terms of: ”Here is what is going to happen!” Both of them were like: ”No, here is what is going to happen!” It not that John and his sister are shrinking violets, but you just couldn't do anything. John finally took his dad's car away from him by saying: ”Hey, let me see those car keys. They look really cool!” and then he was like: ”What do you mean I can't drive?” - ”You are freaking driving up on the sidewalk!” - ”Well, that is what it is there for!”
They have been encouraging her to try and move down to the South end where she is more around and frankly less likely to drive off of a bridge as she gets older. She found a little condo down here in the great city of Burien after years of keeping an eye on what was available and she says: ”I could live here!”, which is exciting because when she turns 88 and she is down here it will be better for everybody. ”Why don't we move you to this condo?” and she gets excited and then the process begins.
She discovered when she sold her house that banks will not give a 30-year mortgage to an 87 year old, particularly after the financial crisis of 2008. They don't care, they don't want to help you. What that means is that if you are 87 and you want to move to a different house you have to sell your other house and then get the cash and buy the new house with cash, which is a crazy thing. If you say to a bank: ”Look, she owns this apartment on Capitol Hill, it is worth X number of dollars. She wants to buy this house, it is worth X number of fewer dollars. You know that all these transactions are reliable and dependable, it is not hard to sell an apartment on Capitol Hill. How can you as the bank help us? Can you stand in the middle as a building full of money and make this a smooth process?” and the bank says: ”No, we cannot!”
John doesn’t want her to sell her condo and live out of her car for a year and a half like he did and he was going to step in and say: ”I will cosign, I will be the responsible party here, because I am not a building full of money, but I am confident that this financial transaction will take place!” Of course the banks are going to take fees out of every side of this. They are just not going to take any risk. John’s mom made an offer on this condo and it was accepted and all of a sudden the balls are in motion, she is going to buy this condo and John is the financially responsible party because he the one that they want to attach all this to as the person that 30 years from now they could still be hammering with a boat paddle.
The other day in attempting to make this business thing happen, the mortgage broker called John and said he and Ken Jennings did not incorporate Omnibus as a limited liability corporation until 2019 and your tax returns do not show it as a company long enough that we can take any of the income from Omnibus into consideration when we adjudge whether you are capable of performing this transaction. John said: ”Omnibus has been has been a show since 2017!” - ”Prove it!” - ”Well, go on the Internet. It is there! It has been there the whole time!” - ”Well, you didn't…” and Ken and John didn't form an LLC because the iHeart Media Network was paying them in birdseed. Once every six months they brought them a goat and said: ”Here is your goat. Split it!” - ”How do you split a goat?”
They didn't incorporate because what would have been the point? They didn't even think about it. It was only after they left iHeart that they said: ”Maybe we should form a corporation!”, but not soon enough! It is not a question of the money. They see that John has only started making money from Omnibus after they got a Patreon, but the fact that they didn't incorporate. This mortgage broker, it is right there in the title of his job: He brokers mortgages. But he says: ”I am powerless to do anything because it is all done at the level of the underwriter” on and on and on.
The point of this story is: Nobody has the authority to do anything, nobody is willing to take a risk in any direction, you can't even prove to them that what is true is true, and they are running the world! John’s mom has made an offer on a condo, it has been accepted, and on one hand he is getting text messages and emails from all the people in the real estate business: ”Are you ready to close? Are you ready to put your good faith money down? Are you ready to come down and sign 50 pieces of paper?” and on the other hand there is a guy telling him that Omnibus isn't a real business and that there is nothing he can do to prove otherwise.
John’s mom is just all smiles, like: ”I am about to move into this wonderful house” - ”Ehhh, yeah, but I am the only way it is going to happen and I can't prove that I have any money!”